TBC Bank is one of Georgia’s leading financial institutions. With a mission to “make people’s lives easier”, its teams continuously strive to deliver exceptional, convenient and engaging banking experiences for customers.
Today, that doesn’t just mean building great apps and digital banking tools. The bank also continuously looks inwards to assess its own engineering operations and ensure that its processes enable teams to bring innovative new services and capabilities to market at speed.
After following Thoughtworks’ thought leadership around Engineering Effectiveness, TBC Bank’s CIO engaged us to support a journey of continuous improvement and accelerate processes across the company’s evolving technology and delivery teams.
TBC Bank had the perfect mindset to embrace Engineering Effectiveness. The organization already knew exactly what it wanted to achieve across its digital tribe. All we had to do was work closely with its teams to enable it.
Identifying opportunities to build Engineering Effectiveness
Like any transformation project, our collaboration began with a detailed exploration of TBC Bank’s engineering processes, structure, tools and infrastructure. We interviewed teams to help us understand the bottlenecks that restricted their ability to deliver at speed and mapped out their workflows. This enabled us to rapidly identify some key areas of focus for improvement — many of which centered around testing.
With our priorities identified, we employed a vertical thin slice approach and selected four squads within TBC Bank’s “digital tribe” to work with initially. Each team went through a transformation process that encompassed four key stages: Baselining, Structured Learning, Pairing and Handover.
During the Baselining phase, we identified granular priorities for each team and devised a comprehensive enablement plan through value stream mapping, observation, analysis, and interviews. Following that, structured learning sessions were conducted with each squad, covering essential topics such as kick-off procedures, desk checks, INVEST workshops and exploratory testing techniques.
This isn’t just consulting. The Thoughtworks team has been hands-on and collaborated with us to enable real transformation. They’re a true extension of our team.
We then facilitated hands-on pairing sessions where squad members were guided through the creation of quality unit tests, technical analysis processes, front-end (Android/iOS) integration tests, end-to-end API tests and more.
At the end of the process, we produced a number of key artifacts including a new engineering playbook, a reference book and a Confluence repository housing reusable assets to support further training and development.
Scaling out an incredible engineering transformation
Together, our enablement initiatives yielded significant results across TBC Bank’s digital tribe. So far we’ve seen:
A 50% reduction in cycle time for pilot squads
A 90% decrease in production bugs for one of the pilot squad’s banking products
API test feedback times fall from three minutes to just 15 seconds
Test times fall from 25 minutes to just 10
While impressive, these results are just the beginning of TBC Bank’s Engineering Effectiveness journey. The team has embraced a “shift left” mindset and adopted a culture of continuous improvement — and is now empowered to constantly and sustainably enhance efficiency, quality and collaboration within its digital operations.
But most importantly, this initial thin slice of enablement work has built confidence across the rest of TBC Bank’s teams. Now, the plan is to scale these changes out across the digital tribe and beyond and help more teams across the organization transform how they operate.
TBC Bank’s digital tribe very quickly realized some amazing results, from a huge drop in cycle time to a massive increase in code quality. But most importantly, this approach has helped kickstart a much wider transformation across its engineering organization — one which will have a major impact on its ability to meet its strategic goals.
